We’ll be the first to say that “interesting” is a pretty vague metric on which to hang an end-of-year list. But it’s actually a yardstick that matters a lot here at Inside Philanthropy.

When you write all day about funders, one way to keep yourself going is to gravitate toward the most fascinating ones. That doesn’t mean you want ignore, say, the legacy foundation that specializes in renewal grants to the Brookings Institution, but it does mean you keep closer tabs on funders aiming to blow up whole sectors of society or revolutionize scientific research or save some forgotten swath of humanity or find answers to the hardest philosophical questions or leverage their money with jiu jitsu-like creativity.